


Forty-Six Seconds

by Innsmouth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Pairings If You Squint, Very old work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-02
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-28 17:47:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/310477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innsmouth/pseuds/Innsmouth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose, Dave, and the Tumor; one's mind tends to wander in the face of a universe unraveled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forty-Six Seconds

  
It isn’t as though you hadn’t chosen to arrive at this point; your suicide-by-cosmic-detonation was entirely premeditated, every decision made with flawless rationale and steely determination. Your choices, and your choices alone, have brought you here. One could bask in pride at such achievements, if they were so inclined.

Despite this, you face your impending demise with rather less than your usual composure.

  
There are forty-six seconds until your painstakingly handcrafted apocalypse.

You’re shaky and rattling in your own skin, heart slamming against your ribs like a trapped animal, well aware of the permanence of what you are about to do. At least, it would be permanent had you refrained from carefully engineering the process of your ascension to godhood. All is in place for your imminent divinity; in the vast chess game of your life, the black king of your mortality is mated by a purposeful bishop and stubbornly trailing knight.

The only thing that is left for you to do is to stand, the soles of your feet throbbing from the unyielding surface of your quest bed, and wait to die.

According to the counter, you have forty-three seconds.

There is some small consolation to be taken in the fact that in this, you are not alone.

You glance over to your left at Dave, standing upon his own bed, only to find him meeting your gaze. Behind his customary aviators, his eyes are huge and frightened, and you’re sure that you look much the same. Despite all of your planning, all of your precautions, all of your perseverance and one shockingly swift and horrifying death, you are still operating on a hypothesis. You are gambling on the apocalypse, and playing dice with the death of universes.

You’ve died once already, but that isn’t what reduces you to mute immobility. What paralyzes you is uncertainty; you are accustomed by now to dealing with crisis, but _not knowing_ has always been a horror. Now is no exception.  
You recognize that all of your theories may come to naught, that none of this may work, that you are potentially throwing your life away for _nothing_ , and that is what terrifies you most.

The inorexably ticking counter gives you sixteen seconds to live.

Your mind drifts first to John, to the way he charged headlong, joyous and enraptured, into the game responsible for the destruction of everything you knew. You think of the first time you were subject to his goofy grin in person; of how as you led him, wreathed as you were in the in the grimdark sorcery of the Furthest Ring, ten thousand unborn horrors pressed and writhing beneath your ashen skin, to the savaged corpses of your parents, all he could say was _did you see that huge raincloud, rose? it was pretty awesome._

You think of Jade, with her boundless enthusiasm and constant kindness. She always took your gentle ribbing about her residence on Hellmurder Island without rancor, and never thought twice about providing assistance in her maddeningly vague way. Since passing into the Furthest Ring, her actions have been a mystery to you; hopefully she has not encountered Jack again.

None of that will matter in a few seconds, but you wish her well nonetheless.

You think of Dave, your pseudotwin, your ectobrother; he of the omnipresent irony and inscrutable coolkid facade. Yours has been a friendhood, or perhaps a siblingship, filled with volleys of sarcasm and the careful deflection of any query remotely into the emotional. Your relations are at once blissfully impersonal and frustratingly detached, a detente imposed by your mutual unwillingness to admit vulnerability.

But he is here for you now, at this bitterest of ends, and for that you are grateful.

You think of your mother—

No.  
You can’t do that.  
Not here.  
Not now, at the eleventh hour.

Perhaps not ever.

There is no time left for regret and unvoiced apologies.

Instead, you contemplate Kanaya.  
It had been quite the surprise to receive out of the blue an exasperated diatribe on the inadequacy of the human race in regards to comprehending time travel, especially when the rant in question possessed Additional Capitalization For Proper Emphasis. Overcoming the awkwardness of such emphatic initial overtures had been an interesting experience; she’d admitted her inability to properly provoke your ire, and your friendship had proceeded from there. Kanaya’s attempts to emulate your particular brand of sarcastic wit had made you smile, and her concern for your welfare was…

You settle on _touching_ as the word closest to something that you are unable to articulate properly.

Her worried attentions had still nudged at that particular feeling, even as she declared her intent to bring your carefully constructed plans to a halt.

 __  
In hindsight, you most likely ought to have heeded her, as all that offering your soul to the dead, yet ever-dreaming eminences of the Circle had gotten you was the point of a blade and a despairing, futile death.

For a half-instant, you wonder what she looks like.  
You realize with a flash of something that feels like sorrow that you may never know.

  
You have four seconds.

” _ **rose**_ ,” he says, tone deceptively calm.

“Dave,” you manage, past your desert-dry mouth and suddenly too-small throat.

You desperately wish to take his hand, to somehow reassure the both of you, in the face of impending annihilation, that somehow it will work out, that _everything will be okay._ You want to confess that you’re _scared,_ damn it, that you’re absolutely _terrified,_ so you can hear him say _ ****_

 **_“i know rose_ **

_**me too”** _

__Your hands stay by your sides, willing but unable. Better that you allow yourselves the illusion of a dignified end.

You say nothing, because there is nothing to say any more.

And then there is nothing at all, as the counter ticks away your final, agonizing second, and in a brief moment there is nothing but green and you cease to be.

You’re still breathing.  
You’re still breathing and your entire _being_ feels as though it is awash in sunlight, and existence has never before been this effortless, and never will be again.

So this, then, is what godhood feels like.

You feel, rather than see, Dave hovering beside you, broken blade still clutched in one clammy, trembling fist. It appears that your plan has only partly come to fruition; your machinations have been responsible for the birth of the Green Sun, rather than its destruction. Regardless, you have both been rendered divine, and at the moment that is the only thing that matters. You feel as though you can take on Noir with ease.

You feel as though you can take on the universe, and that is _exactly_ what you intend to do.

As you glide back through the tenebrous vastness of the Furthest Ring, your brother alongside, you allow yourself a small, satisfied smile.


End file.
